to be reckoned among the taxes to fortune. Hence they had not wasted their hours in Nicaragua, but had diligently, as their duties would allow, visited every rivulet and hill, and talked knowingly of "indications," and "colour," and other technical lore. Regarding themselves as industrious, if rather enterprising, men of business, they would have resented any intimation of romance or recklessness in their present occupation. They spoke in a short, terse way which it was the despair of their allies to understand. Ollendorf had furnished the Spanish student with no equivalent for the wondrous vocabulary of California. The Nicaraguan, who uses not over one-fifth of the words in his glorious Castilian inheritance, was at the verbal mercy of the man who possessed a whole mine of phrases unknown to the lexicographers, and who pitied with a fine scorn the ignorant wretch, native or foreign, who knew not the _patois_ of the mining camp. He even improved upon the language of the country, when he condescended to use it, changing such household words as "nigua" or "jigua," into the more expressive "jigger," nor omitting to prefix it with the Anglo-Saxon shibboleth known to all mankind--the watchword which, hundreds of years ago, gave to English soldiers in foreign towns the charming sobriquet of the "Goddams." The prefix was not inapt, for the "jigger" is the most pestiferous parasite of all his race, and a living thorn in the flesh of his victim. Spanish verbs, like "buscar," "pasear," &c., masqueraded with English terminals and marvellous compound tenses, a wonder of philology. Nor did the sonorous native names come forth unrefined from the furnace of California speech. "Don Jose de Machuca y Mendoza" was a style nomenclature altogether too lofty for democratic tongues, which found it easier and much more sociable to pronounce "Greaser Joe." Whatever was to come of the incongruous alliance, for the present there was a touch of nature, a community of courage, which made the parties kin in thought and action. The native, whether friend or foe, was no coward. In endurance he was the peer of his northern rival, though he lacked the physical strength and wild hardihood of the pioneer. The bivouac before Masaya was but one of a score of such.